My Apartment Manager is not a Planning Thread, #14

[Bob Schroeck]

Maybe... it doesn't have a lot that's setting-specific in it, though. It's more "here's a lot of jargon from the origin timelines".

[Labster]

I was working on fonts for all of the characters who had comments.  Bob, do you want to pick one for your SI?  Google has a lot of handwriting fonts.  Or this site -- maybe this one

And then I got distracted by your comment...

Maybe... it doesn't have a lot that's setting-specific in it, though.  It's more "here's a lot of jargon from the origin timelines".

Oddly enough this comment really tickled my muse, and I started writing a scene.  And I then realized which plot hook it belongs on.  I need to check with Rob on the timeline for his characters in 2017... and steal some characters from Club Lofts.  And some bears.

[Bob Schroeck]

Hm. The font "Nothing You Could Do" on Google works for me.

Though I do like the Looney Toons font. <grin>

[robkelk]

Oddly enough this comment really tickled my muse, and I started writing a scene.  And I then realized which plot hook it belongs on.  I need to check with Rob on the timeline for his characters in 2017... and steal some characters from Club Lofts.  And some bears.

Everything that I have worked out is listed on the wiki - if the character(s) you want don't appear on that list, we can work things out by PM or during the next writers' chat.

[robkelk]

I was doing some wiki updating and made my way to the page for Kokono Misaka... at which point I realized "9" is a stupid name for a girl. Especially when simply changing the N to an r results in an actual Japanese girl's name.

So... Kokono is now being retconned to Kokoro, because "Heart" is a much prettier name than "9" is. In-universe, I'm blaming Mihoshi for mishearing Washuu-chan.

[robkelk]

I've made a decision about my SI.

I don't need to keep up with somebody else's need to be best in order to placate my need to be relevant.

So, SI-Rob doesn't need a huge harem. Three girlfriends leads to quite enough story hooks, some of which we've already explored. Any more is just being greedy.

Although this removes one excuse to bring in the school ships... but I'm sure Tessa would still appreciate having ground troops available.

[Labster]

Anyone have an idea for the "apartment manager" for Academy City? Because of our intro, we need someone who can theoretically provide help to the people there who actually notice they're in another universe. But since they'd be working for Crowley, perhaps that help would only be, well, theoretically helpful. Or helpful for theories. You know.

I've also added pages for Estelle Cruz and Artoria North to the wiki, with long plot summaries from their original fiction. (Incidentally, even though they changed their names, it shouldn't be too hard to guess who they are if you've seen the anime. The wordplay is supposed to be obvious.) It really helped be crystalize what I needed to do with the characters. And why I added them in the first place. Seriously, it was like watching Hamlet and suddenly realizing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were off fighting Rose Duels for the True Cross while nominal protagonist Hamlet was strutting and fretting about Ophelia.

[Labster]

I'm going to repost this link here, because it came up during the writer's chat and I think it needs to be inflicted on all of you as well.  So as a bit of background, our wiki includes things like heights of characters, so we can all get a visual idea of what interactions from characters would look like.

What is the relative scale of the My Little Pony universe? (Stack Overflow)

I did not go into that expecting things like sulfur hexafluoride, gravitational fields, acoustics, North American building standards, and of course bovine breeds.  (Quantum Cop knows about all of these except the last one.)  Bronies and pegasisters are something else.

[Labster]

Okay, this is kind of a silly thing to get caught on, but I must bring it up: portals.  The ones between the apartments.

Mainly, I just wanted to know what it looked like, which is what we discussed on the call.  I thought about making it Stargate shaped (you know, it's for kids), but this is Washuu-tech so it could be anything.  Rob eventually suggested that it probably looked a lot like the door to Washuu's lab, which is kind of obvious if you think about it.  It could probably look like anything, but most likely a normal door.

For the Halloween story, I need a portal big enough to put an entire car through -- perhaps a big double door, or a garage door.  But the entire ground floor of my complex is a parking garage.  So I'm thinking it either needs to be somewhat portable (a security risk) and resizable, or to have a bigger one on the ground floor (another security risk), make large objects compress as they enter the door, the portal itself can be dialed bigger (on both sides?), or I guess I can have my characters just rent a van :/

Also are these portals 1-1 mapped, all heading to a central location?  (Like the portal park in Erfworld, the Hangar is a plausible location.)  Or do they have a way to change the place the door opens to? (Like Howl's Moving Castle and we make Nova Scotia the black one.)  The first is more standard Washuu-tech and potentially more secure, the second is more convenient. This isn't all that important to figure out now, at least for me.  The first one could easily have customs officers like Rob suggested

Or now that I've written this, I could just have Sakura apply The Little and then The Big on the van.  That is obvious, isn't it.  Unless we want the bigger doors.  I'd assume the Ben Rose house would put the portal in the garage (since we all know that space the best anyway).

[Bob Schroeck]

In my notes for Kickstand Cottage, I've noted their portal will be in the garage, and is big enough to walk a motorcycle through -- which mostly fits with the "standard door size" idea. But I don't think any of the girls would object to something large enough to ride through safely.

Elsewhere where I've even given any thought to the portals, I seem to have been envisioning something at least door-sized, and possibly twice to three times that. I know for a fact that when laying out The Old Dietmeier Place, my mental image was something like a small stargate kind of thing. And while Douglass Gardens doesn't have any specifics at all anywhere, I know that I was intending for their portal to be installed in the community center, suggesting again standard door to me.

[Bob Schroeck]

With the assignment of the cast of Girls und Panzer to Douglass Gardens, I've been looking for a good sized plot of land to turn into a tank park, per discussions here and by voice.

I think I might have a candidate. Royce Brook Golf Club in Hillsborough, NJ is something like 20 minutes to half an hour from DGA. As of last year it was even trying to sell off parts of itself to a housing contractor for a new development, so its owners might be amenable to a full buyout circa 2016. The only question, is 435 acres sufficient for decent tank battles?

Leaning in to the realism side of the equation, they'd probably want to build some manner of protective wall around the tankery zone, because the land butts right up against farmland, and we don't want any stray tanks squishing someone's crops. Or even just lobbing a giant paintball into them by accident.

And do we even want to consider insurance costs?

[robkelk]

Tank battles in the source material tend to wander all over the place, but there was one in der Film that at least started on a golf course. Sand traps make for excellent bunkers, apparently.

[Dartz]

If you put them in Ireland they'd be the most powerful army in the country.

[Labster]

I was just editing through the wiki, and the Mizuki Takase's page notes her having an evil twin. Is it actually a twin, or more like a dark reflection? I was just thinking she was living at the same complex as Hikaru Shidou, and she might be the same kind of thing as Nova. Enemy Without trope, I guess?

[robkelk]

She's a dark reflection - that "evil twin" comment has the tropes meaning of the term.

(And she is a dark reflection - her eye and clothing palette is darker than the original's.)

[Labster]

Speaking of Hikaru – she's going to want to go back to her home universe unless her dog Hikari comes too.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ooooh, yeah, forgot about Hikari. (Then again, it's been a quarter century or so since I saw fansubs of MKR. I can be forgiven for forgetting details.)

[Labster]

I just now realized that I yanked Sakura Kinomoto out of her home timelike two days and a few hours before her birthday. Guess who has to stay 11 another six months?

Actually these appear to be all on-purpose decisions. With a birthday of April 1, that makes her the youngest person in her class because that's the cutoff date in Japan. So a CLAMP decision to make her more adorable. And I chose that time to abduct her just before she could start a new school, so I didn't have to write anything related to Clear Card arc, which hadn't begun to air when I started writing.

Of course at her age, she'll want to be older, and we'll just round up the year. And have a (half?) birthday party I need to write.

I'm giving Yomi a similar treatment, but she'll get to have almost a whole year subtracted from her official age. You see, Yomi plans ahead for middle age.

[Labster]

I finally posted the retcon version of "Adrift in Time" in the stories forum, which includes all of the content of "Ti Kallisti" as well now. There are a few entirely new sections, like Chapter 3, in which my SI tries to flirt with Alicia Florence and gets precisely nowhere. It was fun for me to reread, so you should read it (again) too.

[robkelk]

I am so, so tempted to add another marker to the big map... Maybe once I come up with a story to tell about, or set at, the location.

52° 54' 48" N,4° 5' 55" W~[[w:Portmeirion|Portmeirion]]~Why is this on the map? [[w:The Village (The Prisoner)|That would be telling]].~Map-marker-town.png;

[robkelk]

I just added another name to the list of managers. Sort of.

P.L. "Ace" Holder - the manager of the residence in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. Needs a description and a better name. (Yes, (s)he does. That's a Fenspace name, not a Refuge name.) However, I've never visited Australia...

[Bob Schroeck]

Group Captain (ret.) Pamela Lyndon Holder ("Call me 'Pam'"), former fighter pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force, call sign "Ace". So dubbed by a pair of misogynistic fellow cadets when in flight school, who claimed she was only a placeholder for a properly qualified male cadet. They washed out. She graduated with honors.

(A bit anachronistic, since the RAAF only graduated its first female fighter pilots in OTL in 2017, but due to the lack of imported anime characters I'm pretty sure we're not Refuge and we can perhaps excuse a slightly different history. Oh, and the expansion of "P.L." comes from P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins.)

[Labster]

How would it go if I got Nadia and Shinji together, and gave Shinji a shirt with the letter "S" on it, and Nadia a shirt with the letter "P" on it?

Context if you're missing it

[Labster]

Oh, and while we're talking Nadia, I'm pretty sure Grandis's tank "Gratan" qualifies for sensha-do because it was built in 1889.

[robkelk]

I am so, so tempted to add another marker to the big map... Maybe once I come up with a story to tell about, or set at, the location.

52° 54' 48" N,4° 5' 55" W~[[w:Portmeirion|Portmeirion]]~Why is this on the map? [[w:The Village (The Prisoner)|That would be telling]].~Map-marker-town.png;

So, I was adding a character description to Happosai's wiki page, noticed that we still haven't decided where he is, and remembered this post.

Should we put Happosai in The Village? Canon (specifically his debut story) says you can keep him contained with a Shinto ward, and we have a few Shinto priests and miko who can create one.